The networks to which the present invention relates are networks divided into several groups or clusters. Each cluster comprises several nodes and a node called the cluster head which has the role of allocator of resources. This cluster head is elected by techniques known to the person skilled in the art. This type of structure makes it possible to establish ad-hoc communications from peer to peer inside and between the clusters. Once the cluster heads have been chosen, the nodes of a cluster must affiliate to the group head. Once the network has been organized into clusters, it remains to allocate radio resources to allow the communications between the nodes of a cluster while ensuring the qualities of service required or QoS for the communications. The cluster head determines, for example, the transmission channel and the power level to be used by all the nodes which belong to a cluster or in a more general manner, a configuration that is satisfactory for these nodes.
A cluster head having resources in respect of a cluster, it must allocate the resources to the member nodes, for one or more frequencies known to the cluster head. This operation is complex because of the diversity between the types of quality of service QoS required, for example, lag, bitrate, error rate, etc. and the allocating of resources is often posed as an optimization problem. A first approach consists in including the QoS characteristics aimed at in the objective function to be optimized. A second way to envisage the problem is to manage the QoS needs as constraints to the optimization problem. In the latter case, certain works known to the person skilled in the art seek to attain the optimal solution at the price of high computational complexity. Other less complex works do not aim at the optimum while yet offering good performance. An example of this type of approach is to decompose the function for allocating resources into several steps: link allocation, then bandwidth allocation, then optionally allocation of sub-carriers and finally allocation of modulation and coding scheme or MCS jointly with the power.
Patent application US 201210071102 discloses a wireless communication system for implementing a distributed approach, for sharing the frequency spectrum. In this distributed approach, the individual wireless communication devices will negotiate agreements for the use of the available spectrum without involving a centralized authority. The wireless devices will be for example configured to increase the information bitrates of their respective transmissions under predetermined constraints. These predetermined constraints can include transmitted power constraints, interference constraints, for example.
The systems and methods of the prior art known to the Applicant do not, a priori, make it possible to select an optimal system configuration in the presence of operating constraints. They do not make provision to define and manage in a joint manner the frequency or the logical channel and the other configuration parameters.